Cisco Acquires Worklife to Improve Meetings

Cisco picks up meeting application vendor that was taking a unique spin on improving collaboration.

Cisco today announced that it is acquiring privately-held Heroik Labs Inc., doing business as Worklife. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Worklife had raised approximately $1.02 million in funding and was founded in 2014.

Some meetings are more productive than others. The goal of Worklife is to help make meetings more productive with an application platform that provides direction and tools that enable efficient meetings.

"Worklife automates meeting best practices for your entire team or organization," the Worklife website states. "It ensures that meetings have agendas, that the conversation stays on track, and that meeting notes and action items are effectively communicated."

The Worklife technology will be integrated with Cisco's existing Spark collaboration platform. Rob Salvagno, Cisco's VP for corporate business development, said that with Worklife, the Cisco Spark virtual meeting experience can be enhanced.

"For example, we can start offering additional tools, tightly integrated into Cisco Spark, to help users track calendars, create agenda templates, and collaborate on note-taking in real-time during a meeting," Salvagno wrote in a blog post.

Worklife has offered both free and paid services to customers. Cisco has now pledged that Worklife's existing software will be free.

"In fact, all Worklife customers, both free and paid, will now enjoy the functionality of the paid version for free," a Cisco FAQ on the deal states.

Worklife's operations and teams are being integrated into the Cisco Cloud Collaboration Technology Business Unit under Senior Vice President and General Manager Jens Meggers.

Cisco has been busy in recent years expanding its collaboration platform capabilities through a series of acquisitions. In May 2015, Cisco acquired Tropo, bringing cloud collaboration API technologies to Cisco. In November 2015, Cisco acquired British collaboration vendor Acano for $700 million in a bid to help improve online meetings with improved virtual meeting room capabilities.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Enterprise Networking Planet and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist